No opera captures the American death drive quite like “Grounded.” Chosen by the Metropolitan Opera to open its 2024–25 season, composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist George Brant’s paean to the F-16 follows Jess, an Air Force fighter pilot forbidden from flying due to her pregnancy and later assigned to conduct drone strikes remotely from a trailer in Las Vegas. Unable to reconcile her day job as a hired killer with her identity as a mother and wife, Jess crashes her drone in a spontaneous act of protest. From the synopsis, “Grounded” may seem like a radical intervention into the liberal discourse surrounding the War on Terror, and indeed Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, describes the opera as “antiwar,” according to the New York Times. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like it: Tesori’s score is almost impossibly boring, while Brant’s libretto is as dramatically ineffective as the War on Terror was morally bankrupt. In the end, the clichéd drum rolls and bugle calls of “Grounded” reinforce rather than challenge the specular image of U.S. military superiority.
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